BY PETER BOYLE
Mark Latham began his final run for the leadership with his September 20 "Light on the Hill" lecture in Bathurst. It was his second leadership-bid speech in six months thinly disguised as a declaration of loyalty to the serially besieged ALP leader Simon Crean.
Latham has been working on the key elements of this pitch for years, taking his support for "free market" capitalism and dressing it up in fancy garb to sell to the masses as a new vision for "modern Labor".
His 1998 book, Civilising Global Capital, had won him media branding as one of Labor's "young Turks". He became a darling of the Australian Financial Review because he argued that the ALP should embrace capitalist globalisation, abandon the notion of class (new technology has allegedly dissolved the division between capital and labour), promote Australia as a "shareowner democracy", and get stuck into what remained of the welfare state. Coalition PM John Howard and his treasurer Peter Costello welcomed the book as endorsement for Liberal policies.
But given growing public resentment of the social and ecological vandalism wreaked by two decades of free market "reforms" (privatisation, economic deregulation and public austerity), Latham has had to dress this up as a "Third Way" between socialism and economic liberalism.
This was not an original idea. Former US President Bill Clinton and British PM Tony Blair adopted the "Third Way". Blair said "New Labour" and Latham says "Modern Labor". (Blair's New Labour, of course, is based partly on the legacy of former Australian Labor PMs Bob Hawke and Paul Keating).
Clinton, Blair and Latham have all argued that the mobility of global capital meant that there was no choice but to give way to the "free market". If any government dared challenged the market, capital would flee overseas. Social democratic governments should instead work to increase economic competition and this in turn would create wealth that will benefit everyone. While Civilising Global Capital got the AFR's editors excited, its turgid and abstract arguments failed to register with the public. Since then, Latham has been working to popularise his message. During the last few years, he has re-worked his line in his speeches and spiced it up with colourful attacks on his political opponents — inside and outside the ALP — as "arse-lickers", "cream puffs" and "conga-line of suckholes".
These antics helped erase his well-deserved tag as a Liberal in the Labor Party. It also secured him regular attention as the "bruiser" on the Labor bench.
Latham also borrowed the idea of the "new elites" from the jargon of far-right conspiracy theories, popularised in part by Pauline Hanson in the 1990s.
At the May launch of his latest book From the Suburbs: Building a Nation from our Neighbourhoods, Latham said: "This is a book about the forgotten people: the people without power, influence or assets in the vast suburbs and regions of our nation. It's a book about the new dividing line in public life: the struggle between the insiders and the outsiders."
Latham was not talking about the growing gap between the rich and the poor — though he does concede that it is "shocking" that "the top 20% of households own 65% of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 20% owns nothing at all".
Associate professor of politics at Adelaide University Carol Johnson explains in a recent paper, "From the Suburbs: Mark Latham and the Ideology of the ALP", that for Latham the "outsiders" are "aspirational" working-class and small business people of the suburbs.
The "insiders" are "powerful people from both sides of the ideological fence who are reluctant to transfer influence and control to other citizens". Insiders often live in the inner-city and include people with views as ideologically diverse as Piers Ackerman and Phillip Adams, who are members of the "cultural elite" (see ).
This is an ALP play for the sort of "wedge politics" that Howard has successfully exploited and Latham is happy to target the same scapegoats: "dole bludgers", refugees, Aborigines and other "sectional interests" that have supposedly benefited unfairly from special treatment.
But Latham is selling dreams that cannot be delivered:
- "Labor can be pro-market without necessarily being pro-business. We must impose higher levels of corporate social responsibility in this country. We also need to reduce the shocking level of asset inequality."
- "I want to put them back in. The rungs of opportunity that come from good quality health care in our society, the opportunity that comes from a decent, affordable education, the basic services that all our community rely on."
- "Currently, around 60% of Australian households are significant asset owners. For Labor, this is not enough. We want a big tent of economic ownership. We want ownership for all."
A look at how another "Third Way" snake-oil merchant's pitch has translated into reality is revealing. Five years after Tony Blair's New Labour was elected to government:
- The British Institute for Fiscal Studies reported in March that income inequality had increased since Labour came to power. Income inequality over the past two years has been higher than in any other period since 1979.
- IFS also found that 3.8 million children in Britain live in poverty.
Meanwhile, back home the "conga line of suckholes" beckons Latham.
As soon as he was selected ALP leader, Latham stressed that, despite referring to US President George Bush as "flaky, dangerous and incompetent", he believed in the US alliance.
The US ambassador, Tom Scheiffer, said with a knowing smile that he regarded Latham's attacks on his country to be "of the past". Scheiffer called Latham's office soon after the December 9 leadership ballot to congratulate him. Two days later Latham returned the gesture with a visit to the US embassy and a press briefing before the stars and stripes and the Australian flag.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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